How property-owners disqualify ‘single’women seeking accommodation

The ultimate among a plethora of considerations that typical property-owners target when leasing is whether the interested renter has the financial capacity to pay and subsequently sustain rent.

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But the demonstration of this ability doesn’t often suffice in the case of women whose marital status reads single. Landlords appear to have set singlehood as a disqualifying profile in the jostle to secure accommodation, Businessday findings show.

Last February, Promise Nkiruka, a 25-year-old banker in Lagos, lost the opportunity to obtain a modest three-bedroom apartment of her choice within thr Lekki peninsula, Lagos simply because she is single. The property-owner would rather have a married man use his facility than have Nkiruka, her cousin and friend join funds together to secure the apartment.

As a vivacious lady whose career was just picking up in one of the leading financial institutions in the country, all she wanted was to set up a personal space that expressed her youthful taste and enabled her focus on work.

“I practically loved the house but I lost it because I’m a lady. He (landlord) wouldn’t give me the place except I’m married. He said he doesn’t even want to give his apartment to girls except I can keep being  a working class lady and don’t give him issues,” the young lady said, narrating her ordeal.

Even with cash in hand, Obianuju Okafor, a fresh employee in Enugu as of 2016 could not secure an apartment independently until her father intervened. She had been squatting with a friend when she received a short notice to leave.

“I thought it was going to be something easy. I had to go through an agency who would try to hide me from the landlords so that they won’t know I am a single lady,” Okafor said. When she met the landlord directly, she was asked to bring someone, preferably a male figure that would be able to attest to the fact that she can afford the rent and that she is well-behaved.

During his National Youth Service Corp in Ogun state, Amaechi practically had to front his female colleague who was seeking an accommodation. Since his presence seemed to establish a kind of confidence that was missing when she engaged alone, she handed the rent to Amaechi who paid in her stead.

The instances show that in a neck and neck competition between a single man and a single woman, landlords, depending on how deeply inclined they are with traditional African expectations of women or their level of exposure to the nuances of equality in gender rights, choose men as the preferred tenant 90 percent of the time.

Normally, potential house hunters are simply required to state clearly where they work, the nature of work and the purpose of use.

But with a gender-based tweak of ground rules, a young woman aspiring to get an apartment has to first prove beyond reasonable doubt to the property-owner why she wants to live independently rather than with her husband in a union.

If she passes the independence test, landlords often soak themselves in the worry of whether a woman tenant would be sexually responsible, whether she won’t introduce other sexually reckless housemates or technically convert the apartment into a brothel.

The challenge facing women is not exact for every context but since the current majority share of the housing demand is supplied by private homeowners, the arbitrariness and lack of fairness in the standards of qualifying and disqualifying is a growing concern that many women fear could dovetail into unequal access to housing sponsored by gender bias.

Victor Bailey, a landlord in Oregun area of Ikeja, Lagos admits that when it comes to tenancy, the traditional orientation still holds sway among him and several of his colleagues.